Hey guys. I feel like an ass for doing this but I have a little problem. In about two weeks I begin my employment adventure in Yellowstone National Park. Unfortunately I’ve come up about $150 short in travel expenses with no current income to cover it. No income to fund the travel to get to the job that provides the income. Not cool. It’s such a small amount that I feel ridiculous asking, but that tiny amount stands between me and my direction.

The mother of claws and feathers.
The man she hunted,
A coppery dream lingering in her cheek.
A plasma love.
(all mine)
(to the bone)

In my chest, muscle stutters
in attempts to follow
the ticking pulse of the mirrored faces,
Darting from every peripheral glance.

(thump)
(tick)

I’ve come to her,
Her child with a field of face irrigated in aggravated tears.
To the mother of claws and feathers
I’ve brought my nightmares.
“Kill them,” I cry. “They know my name. They eat me alive.”

All fanged affection,
Pure jagged maternal love,
She is to the sky.
A soothing glint of murderous nurturing.

And the very last thing the demons will sing,“Is that the soft beating of mighty wings?”

Edit: I took both Claritin and Ativan today. Ativan swirls my thoughts into spindled colors, clawed arms that reach for ashen skies. Claritin apparently spins me right out into intense disassociation. I’m ok. I’m really ok. I’ll be even better once I get some good sleep. All that follows needed to be said anyway.

We play fearlessly in the dark now.

If Manticore is our mother

who are these people calling us into houses blindingly fluorescent

~*

In colors we don’t understand

Feelings beyond our comprehension

We don’t love

(Because you have to love yourself!)

We don’t love because it’s not safe

We are platonic and we are familial

We do not touch

We do not surrender physical acts of control

We do not surrender emotional acts of control

~*

We don’t hug because we don’t show weakness. We don’t hug because if you don’t touch us, we feel safe. We don’t hug family because they stand too close. (Tell the truth. We don’t hug family because we don’t trust them.) They stand too close and they don’t entirely understand that getting close to our face makes us profoundly uncomfortable. If they stand too close they might know. They might hear the grinding and crunching noise that happens in our chest. They might hear the screaming terror that is always one breath away. They might know that yellow is sick and so we hide it under blue so that we can be green. They might know, that we don’t know if we are dangerous. We don’t know the lengths that we would go to reclaim our space. To reclaim our safety.
We play fearlessly in the dark because it’s safer than the light.

And yet. And yet we crave affection from others. Maybe. We think we crave it. We theoretically crave human warmth.

We are we today because we can’t be me. Not right now. We are not fortified. We are not incorporated. We are a thousand black and purple tendrils. We are feeling the you. The you because we need to keep the you at this length. Don’t touch us. We will destroy everything we must to keep our safety.

We did too much today. We saw too much, heard too many things. Too many people touched us. All the while our lungs were shredding in our chest. We always wonder how much of this is psychosomatic. Predictive. Our airways constrict and every inhale is razors, every exhale is flame. We know why. We can’t fix it right now. We say right now a lot.

Self-indulgent but there is no catharsis until someone else hears us. Until our words are read they stay inside of us. They kill us slowly, we don’t reincorporate, we disassociate. We disappear to hammered numbness. We die.

They finally replaced the picture
Now if I could only get them to take the painting down
I painted it when I was 16
17, irrelevant
I painted it in a psychiatric hospital
A memory I’d rather not look at over breakfast
I brought it home and they framed it
It’s sat there for 12 years
“How are you feeling?”

I have two pictures
In one you look so sad
it crushes me
In the other you’re laughing
These are my two favorite versions of you
Tired. You looked tired
not sad.
I want to touch your face
to feel the soul exhaustion there
I want my face against your neck
So that you know
you’re never truly alone

If I could paint you into the landscape
Maybe we would both be alright
If I could make your exhaustion
Purple
And my crushed soul
Green
Then we could be
Orange
And then, at least
We would never be cold

In 1995 my family had a Tandy. It was a hand-me-down from my aunt Gail. This was an incredible bit of technology for my family as we had very little money and never would have been able to purchase something like this on our own. We didn’t really have much to do with it, honestly. My dad made spreadsheets for the office at the fire department where he volunteered. We played countless hours of Minesweeper and Solitaire.

My family are geeks. All of us. My sister likes anime and Dr. Who; my parents like dungeon crawlers and are casual Trekkies; and I’m just into all sorts of things. While out running errands we would almost always visit Radio Shack. (Googled and discovered they still exist, just not anywhere near here.) Mostly we just poked around. It was a tiny shop and there was only enough room to turn around once. Every wall could easily be seen from anywhere in the store. In the middle there was a shallow metal basket on a table full of PC games. Most of them were point and click puzzle games and we usually just skipped over it. I was 9 and was just entering my fascination with horror and things that were intentionally scary. The world was already a scary place, other peoples nightmares were a kind of escapism for me. So when I saw the box with the big dark house on a cliff there was really no question as to whether or not we needed it.

The 7th Guest consumed us. We played the game inside and out. It was before easily accessible walk-throughs and so it was a good long time before we managed to entirely beat the game. I say “we” because we all chipped away at it, both my parents and I spent countless frustrated and fascinated hours exploring the Stauf house, solving puzzles and piecing the story together. Once we finished it, we started over, picking up Easter eggs, and other clever subtleties. Even still, about 20 years later I remember how some of the puzzles were solved. As a matter of fact every time I cut a cake now I think of the very first puzzle. “Two skulls, two stones, the rest is just icing.”

Eventually we had to upgrade out of Windows 3.5 and found that we could no longer play our favorite game. We gave the sequel The 11th Hour a chance but it really couldn’t match our love for the first game.

I have a Steam account that I don’t ever look at. I’m bad at games, they don’t really fall in my geek spectrum. I would much rather watch someone play a RPG than play it myself; FPS games disorient me; and any strategy based game can basically be thrown out. So my two L4D’s, Portal, Home and Analogue go completely untouched. (Stop buying me games, I fail at playing them!) I don’t remember why I decided to take a look at it (I’m sure it’s Ari’s fault) but while I was absentmindedly scrolling through the store for Linux compatible games I stopped dead on The 7th Guest. I squeed fairly hard.

Squee may have been a bit of an understatement. Poor Ari received this as a wall crashing down into Skype. I am so excited to gift this game to my dad. I’ve drawn something up to put in a box so that he actually has something to open on Christmas.